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Friday, August 28, 2015

RUNNIN’ OFF THE LEASH

My buddy, Mean Pete
Brandvold, is one of the most popular and prolific writers (well over 100
novels and still counting) currently working in the western genre. He’s also
almost completely turned to self-publishing as a profitable and liberating
alternative to dealing with the bureaucratic pomposity of legacy publishing.
When I asked, he willingly set aside his latest six-gun and sagebrush saga to
let us in on his self-publishing adventures…

RUNNIN’ OFF THE LEASH

PETER
BRANDVOLD

My whole career is based on a lie.

I mean, beyond the lies of the fiction I
write. I would, however, argue fiction in general is a whole lot more honest
than the fibs I tell daily – outside of my novels – just to amuse myself.

When I’m writing my western tales, I
feel truer than I ever feel in the real world – meaning the world outside of the world in my
head. The world in my head is the one I bleed onto the computer screen eight to
nine hours every day. It is the world that has kept me from getting a really
good night’s sleep since I went through the somnambulism of adolescence.

My characters are more me than I am. Does that makes sense? No, I’m not drunk. Yet. Getting back to the lie...

Back in 1996, I sent my first western manuscript
to a New York editor. He not-so-promptly rejected it, telling me westerns need to be really gritty these days. Good
luck! So, being the good liar I am, I sent the book back to him saying, Okay, I grittied it up for ya! Or
something similar.

In truth, I didn’t change a word. I
didn’t even run the thing through the printer again. I just sent the same
manuscript back to the same editor. I might have even reused the same envelope
he sent it back to me in. And it sold!

Once A Marshal came out a year later. Obviously, the manuscript hadn’t been
read the first time around.

Which brings me to the thesis of this
wandering discourse, which is about how much I hated having to answer to those
corporate orangutans for a good fifteen years and nearly one hundred novels,
and how much I love publishing my own westerns under my own pernicious imprint –
Mean Pete Press.

It’s true I owe New York something for
giving me my start. But just a little.
Unless you’re Stephen King, you really get treated like the mutt in the kennel
of the New York book publishing industry – when you get treated like anything
at all.Mostly, you get ignored, and
treated with condescension. Generally, you’re treated like one of the fellas
wearing the red shirts on Star Trek.

For instance, they’ll ask you for input
on the kind of book cover you want.Of
course, they’ll want it right away because the editor forgot to ask you two
weeks ago when she should have. And she’ll remind you in the tone of your
first-grade teacher that if you don’t write the description you can’t complain
about the cover which will end up slapped around your prose.

So, since you’re the small fish who needs
to please the big fish, you take a couple of hours off from the book you were
hammering away on so busily. You proceed to busily write up a good description
of the ideal cover that’s gonna make this book the biggest book of your whole
career!

You really work at it, and you nip it
and tuck it, and you hit send. The you
sit back with a big grin of a job-well-done on your mug.

And when you get the proof back, the
cover looks nothing like your description. It couldn’t look more different than
a Van Gogh from a Kinkade!

Turns out the editor forgot to bring to
the meeting the description you so dutifully dropped everything to write,. As a
result, the art department just went with what they had on the shelf. When you
call your editor on it, she says something like, Gosh, I just got busy and it slipped my mind. Thanks so much for being
so understanding, Peter. You’re a great team player. Cheers!

In the New York publishing world, unless
you’re James Patterson, you have no mouth and yet you must scream...

So, yeah, I’m glad to be out of the
fringe of the New York publishing mainstream and hustling my own books myself
on Amazon – and getting 70% of the cut from each sale rather than 8-10%. When I
was writing for a long-running adult western series, I was getting a measly 6%
of the sale of each mass-market paperback. When I found out I was getting only
6% of each e-book sale, as well, I went Johnny Paycheck.

Like many other writers (at least the
ones as stupid as me), I thought all publishers were obliged to pay their writers
a minimum of 25% for each e-book sale. Wasn’t that the industry standard?

Somehow, this publisher was able to
scheme all the authors working on the series out of those earnings. The
publisher claimed that since we were writing under a house name we were merely work
for hire employees – even though I did nothing different in writing that
adult series than I did in writing any of my other novels.

Soon after, the publishers canceled the series
– not because I quit, but because they felt they weren’t making enough money on
the adult westerns anymore despite dropping their advances to pennies and
pisswater. However, every quarter I still receive royalties for nearly every
series novel I wrote across ten years – even at 6% earnings! Even at 6%
earnings on e-books!

So, imagine what the publisher is still
making on those books, since they’re getting 94%! Yet they didn’t think they
were making enough to keep the books coming, despite the writers and readers
who had come to love and depend on those yarns each month. In fact, they
canceled all of their westerns.

That’s New York for you. They have to
make truckloads of money on something or they won’t publish it. They simply don’t
care how many writers and readers are depending on the product. Nor do they
care who they screw.

Just one more (possibly two) knock(s)
against New York…

In all the years I wrote for them, I
might have had one editor – and he was a real anomaly – who’d ever even read a
western before he’d started editing them. Can you imagine putting an editor on
a genre they’d never read before? And I dare say most of my editors had nothing
but disdain for the western – the very genre they were editing! And I use the term editing loosely. Mostly, my editors changed what didn’t need to be
changed, and totally dropped the ball on obvious mistakes.

So, yeah, I’m very happy here in the
very un-corporate offices of Mean Pete Press, in this little adobe house, in
this quiet little town in western Minnesota. It’s just me and my dog, and no
suits telling us what to do.

Now, since I’m running off the leash, so
to speak, I can come up with new series ideas at the drop of the Stetson. Instead
of writing up a long, laborious proposal an editor may or may not skim, I just
pour a cup of hot mud, pick up the laptop, and let my fingers dance the western
rumba!

That’s what I did recently with my new
western series – The Shotgun Rider. I
just finished the second book, Two
Smoking Barrels, which is up on Amazon, by the way. I’m very proud of that
series. I think it’s turning out well because it’s new and fresh and I could
spontaneously start writing it without having to jump through a bunch of
corporate hoops.

I write a book a month now and publish
them myself on Amazon. Not because I need to write that much but because I LOVE
to. I do my own editing and I make my own book covers. For the covers, I don’t
use any elaborate software – mostly just Pages
which came with my Macs. I might have spent $150, tops, on all the stock photos
I’ve purchased from online sights.

I like the challenge of doing things
independently and on the cheap. The covers might look a little cheap, but I figure the stuff between those virtual
pasteboards makes up for it. My name is well enough known in the western genre
that readers know what they’ll be getting from me, despite the cover. In the meantime, I’m working on it. One
of these days I might just spring for Photoshop.

That’s another thing I love about
self-publishing – all the opportunities to learn new stuff, to grow at my own
time and my own pace, answering to only myself.

Don’t fence me in!

That said, I still like ink and paper.
And since I know many readers still do, I publish one or two traditional paper
books a year with Five Star, which is still a small enough company that they’re
able to do terrific work, which they seem to love doing. They don’t suffer from
the bureaucratic-like dysfunction of larger publishing companies. They’re good
at publishing books, and, while their advances are low, they’re royalties are
competitive. Like me, they know how to carve out their own niche and grow a market. In that way, they compliment my own self-publishing beautifully.

I’m not making money hand over fist, but
then I never was. But we here at Mean Pete Press – i.e., Mean Pete and his dog
Syd – are devoted to writing the best damn westerns we can, and are having one
hell of a good time running off our leashes while we do it. Hell, we don’t even
wear collars!

We may not be drinking champagne every
night, but we are drinking the champagne of beers...

ABOUT PETER BRANDVOLD:Born
and raised in North Dakota, Peter Brandvold has been writing westerns full time
under his own name and his pen name, Frank Leslie, for 15 years. Before
becoming a full time writer, he taught English on the Rocky Boy's Indian
Reservation in northern Montana. He currently lives in northern Colorado where,
in addition to traditional westerns, he writes paranormal westerns and
screenplays.